Classifying means segregating. It means seeing the world as something that can be made up of different entities that could be sorted and make what has been organized into something real. Thus, the Nursing Diagnoses (ND) aims at being an archive that allows a knowledge framework to be drawn about the individuals. In this paper we intend to learn how nurses have built this documental device. So, we analysed articles published on the Revista Brasileira de Enfermagem and found out that some meanings have been attributed to ND, which allowed us to group them into five classes. We also observed that the journal's discourses assign powers to such classification, because they make this knowledge stronger by publicising it.